ATI's Crossfire is the much anticipated answer to Nvidia's highly successful SLI system for running two GPUs at once. But how does it stack up?

Ever since the introduction of SLI by NVIDIA, ATI have been struggling to catch up. The fact is it would take a monster of a card to stand up to two of NVIDIA’s flagship cards working together, and ATI were having a hard enough time keeping up with NVIDIA on the single card front. So ATI have created a multi-GPU solution of their own, Crossfire.

To use Crossfire you need a motherboard using an ATI Xpress 200 Crossfire Edition chipset, any X800/X850 graphics card, and a Crossfire Edition card of the X800/X850 variety. ATI let you use any variation of these cards, so if you have a X800 Crossfire Edition card you can use Any standard X800 to pair up with it, X800XT, X800Pro, etc. If one card has a higher clockspeed than the other, then they will both operate at their individual clockspeed with no clocking down.



Also, if one card has more pixel pipelines than the other, they will both work at the lesser card’s number of pipelines. This means there are a lot more people who can get Crossfire working than people with SLI, to get SLI working you need the same clockspeed and exactly the same card (NVIDIA recently released drivers to let you use different manufacturers cards together as long as they have the same specifications though).